For National Poetry Month, I labored fiercely over a self-imposed project of writing “letters” to poets using a specific form that I concocted by piecing together a couple of different odes. It was nothing short of a brain buster! I’ll admit I’m glad I finished it, that it’s over, and I can move on to letting myself operate in a different way.
Challenges like that are good, in my opinion: I feel like it’s healthy to make myself create within a restricted framework every so often.
BUT NOW woooooo much to my delight I am doing what I had originally planned to do during the month of April, which is work from the book that you see in the photo above. A friend of mine recently taught a workshop and this is one of the texts she used. The truth is I couldn’t justify spending the money on the workshop, although I sorely wanted to, so I got a copy of the book instead and am carrying out the exercises on my own.
The “journal” is divided into lots of smaller sections that are focused on specific aspects of poem writing. Each section is prefaced with a short list of poetry by known authors; they are all available online but I have been printing them out because 1. I don’t like to read things on a screen and 2. I want to be able to write on the paper.
So far, I have only worked through one and a bit sections, but oh my: I don’t know if my brain was just ripe for this work, the stars are aligned correctly, the wind is blowing the right way, or the Lord is endorsing this path (possibly all of them at once) but I am writing some things as a result that I am really proud of. I’m looking forward to sharing them with you!
The sharing, however, will start another day, and will probably happen mostly on Medium, but I wanted to put this book out there to all of you who might be looking for a new writing companion. I would highly recommend it!
The Poetry Patio 